“Much might be said upon the state of loyalty, and the principles of loyalty, in America,” William Howe explained to the House of Commons in 1779, where he was called to defend himself against accusations of mismanaging the American Revolutionary War. “Some are loyal from principle; many from interest; many from resentment; [and] many wish for peace but are indifferent to which side prevails.” In Howe’s view, American colonists had complicated loyalties.

Nearly 250 years later, our panel explores the often-overlapping, contradictory, and multifaceted allegiances held by diverse colonists during the Revolutionary Era, contributing to a growing body of literature dedicated to unraveling complicated loyalties. As one historian recently noted in his work on the relationship between emotions and loyalty, scholars have moved away from a binary understanding of allegiance to better appreciate “a spectrum of loyalties, encompassing neutrality, pacifism, indifference, opportunism, and pragmatism, as well as more familiar tropes such as ideological Toryism.” As another scholar of loyalist women writers during the Revolution has argued, exploring loyalty beyond the Tory/patriot dichotomy allows historians to better identify and understand traditionally marginalized people who were barred from “casting votes, taking oaths, writing laws, or publishing opinions.” We believe our panel’s focus on complicated loyalties builds on these ideas and will be of particular interest as historians and the broader public prepare for the Revolution’s semiquincentennial in 2026.

The three papers that comprise our panel underscore the benefits of more deeply investigating revolutionary loyalties. Focusing on les habitants of Quebec, Jacqueline Reynoso’s (California State University Channel Islands) paper explores subjecthood in the midst of the geopolitical shifts that reshaped eighteenth-century British North America, addressing allegiance beyond the Anglo-American spectrum and expanding the geographical boundaries of study. G. Patrick O’Brien’s (University of Tampa) paper investigates the myriad causes and consequences of one New England family’s post-war repatriation from Nova Scotia to Massachusetts, highlighting how loyalist families navigated conflicting obligations to each other and their respective communities. Christina Carrick’s (The Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University) paper follows the movement of exiled loyalists around the Atlantic, examining the broader commercial connections and transatlantic trade community that they created during the war and, in some cases, continued to benefit from after they later reintegrated into the new United States.

Commenting on loyalist historiography at an annual meeting of the AHA on the eve of the Bicentennial, Wallace Brown noted, “If the backwards glance is rather bleak, the view forward at two hundred years is favorable. Something of a renaissance in Loyalist studies is now taking place and all indicates that the movement will grow.” We see our panel as evidence of the field’s vibrancy fifty years later and indicative of how it could continue to grow in the future.